More than half the US population - 169.5 million people - use Facebook. Coming from every walk of life, Facebook users gather to share life events and updates to loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. Due to this large reach and continuously growing marketing options available, businesses have flocked to Facebook for its marketing capabilities. Social media marketing as a whole is an effective and low-cost way to reach new audiences, which is why small and large businesses alike are attracted to using the platform to get their names out there. However, large businesses often have a team of marketing professionals behind them to handle this task. At Responsival - the trusted name in Pittsburgh social media marketing - we partner with you to help your small business grow, which is why we’ve created this quick guide to social media marketing on Facebook so that you can have a better understanding into the insights that Facebook provides you. 

We’ll break down Facebook marketing for dummies through the lens of both organic and paid reach, showing you how you can understand this information for a greater understanding of your Facebook marketing efforts.

Facebook Marketing for Dummies: What You Need to Understand About Your Organic Posts

Tips from the Experts of Social media Marketing Pittsburgh on Making the Most Out of the Information You Share on Facebook

Organic Facebook posts are the posts you send out without paying to boost them. These posts can be in the form of status updates, sharing videos, images, creating polls, and so much more. However, on the surface, it appears that there’s no way of telling how a post is performing outside of the number of likes, shares, and comments.

To get more information on your organic social media posts on Facebook, you’ll need to access your Insights page. You can reach your insights by visiting your business’s page. At the top, you’ll see a while navigation bar with a variety of listings. On that toolbar, click ‘Insights’ (and if it’s not there, click the ‘More’ drop-down, which is where Insights may be hiding). 

On the Insights page, you’ll immediately be presented with your page summary, which gives you information on your number of page views, followers, and the level of engagements on your posts. Facebook will represent these numbers with an accompanying percent change compared to the previous 7 days. This information - if you see a large rise or drop off - gives you a quick visual cue that you may need to change some of your practices.

On the left-hand side, you’re able to click to see more information on the analytics outlined in your page summary. For us, some of the most important information here includes the following tabs:

• Posts: The Posts tab gives you detailed information into each post you had sent during the specified date range. You’ll receive insights into which posts types are performing best, which are falling behind, and how many people engaged with your posts. From this page, you can even boost well-performing posts to make the most out of the content you’ve already created and shared on Facebook.
• Reach: Your reach is the number of people who have seen your posts. Facebook presents your reach in the form of an easy-to-reach graph organized by date so that you can see peaks and drop-offs of the number of people seeing your posts. Use this information to see what you did on that specific day that’s working or not working well, or see if there is a pattern in days that your posts are seen (maybe Tuesdays are a good day for you, or people engage with you more on Holidays) and use this to your advantage.
• People: Every successful business knows its audience. The People tab on your Insights page helps make this easier for your small business. The People age gives you a breakdown of your demographics - the gender of your audience, their ages, and where they live. You can look at this information for fans of your page, the people you reach, and the people who are engaging with your posts. Discrepancies in these numbers could tell you important information about where your targeting needs to lead for your paid Facebook strategy -- which we’re about to dive into.

Facebook Marketing for Dummies: What You Need to Understand About Your Paid Posts

The Basics of Facebook Ads Insights from the Leaders in Social Media Marketing Pittsburgh

Paid posts are exactly what they sound like -- putting your money where your (social media) mouth is. Facebook allows you to create paid posts in two different ways:

• Boosted Posts: paid promotions you can ad directly from a post on your page. You are able to boost a post, target it, and see the posts’ paid performance directly on the post itself (just you can see this, not your audience). Boosting is great for promoting a contest, event, or a well-performing post.
• Ad Campaigns: Ad campaigns are used for a variety of objectives including lead generation, sales, boosts in web traffic, and many more. Ad campaigns are managed within Facebook Ad Manager and have the capability of building out multiple audiences, automatically utilizing top-performing assets, and A/B testing various aspects of your ad.  These campaigns are often super in-depth and strategic. While ad campaigns (in some ad objectives) are not different on the surface from a boosted post, ad campaigns are essentially boosted posts on steroids.

While boosted posts and ad campaigns have their differences, all insights on your paid posts can be found within ads manager. To get to ads manager, you want to click the drop-down on the right-hand side of your Facebook homepage. Select the tab under ‘Business Manager’ where you will be directed to your Ad Accounts. Select your ad account to be taken to your campaigns page. From here, you’ll be able to see all current and past paid promotions. Pro tip: if some information isn’t displayed, simply adjust the date range at the top of the page.

Here’s a breakdown of what some of the most important information on your Campaigns page tells you and what that means for your business’s social media marketing efforts:

• Results: The results column tells you how many clicks, likes, engagements, or leads were generated from your paid spend. The number of results garnered is dependent on a variety of factors - including ad spend, targeting, and the ad objective itself. It’s important to note that it’s easier to get someone to click a link or like a post than follow a page or enter an email address for lead generation. If your ad objective involves a more ‘valuable action,’ you may have fewer results for your spend.
• Reach/Impression: Reach tells you how many people see your ad and impressions tells you how many individual times your ad was viewed. While seemingly confusing, the number of impressions gives you baseline information on your ad frequency (which we’ll talk about in a moment) and how engaging your ad is to your audience. If your impressions are drastically higher than your reach, you may want to adjust your ad.
• Cost per Result: Cost per result is one of the most important columns because it tells you how much you are being charged for actions to be taken regarding your ad. Whether your action is a click, a lead form submission, or impression (measured in CPM, or cost per 1,000 impressions), you’ll see how much it costs for each action to be taken. How much these actions cost is heavily industry-dependent, but we like to consider less than $1 per click a standard benchmark for many of our ads.
• Frequency: Your frequency is the number of times each person sees an ad. This number is important so that you know whether your audience is too small or your ad spend is too big. On average, it should take 1-2 times to see an ad before clicking on it. If your frequency score is 3.4 or above, you will see a significant dropoff in your number of actions taken.
  

Think you’re ready to start hacking your Facebook marketing efforts? Reach out to Responsival - the experts of Social Media Marketing Pittsburgh - to see how we can help make your Facebook marketing efforts surpass the competition.